The technosphere, our agency, our planet
What can we do, what should we do?
Hegel famously called institutions the ‚second nature’. Indeed, in modern societies, our relationship with the ‘first nature’ is deeply shaped by institutions that govern our interactions. In fact, what is ‘nature’ is not given, but is an institutional construct itself. Therefore, if we want to heal our broken relationship with the biosphere, we must change …
Continue reading "Lessons of Customary Law for a Geocentric Legal Transformation"
In the literature on global justice, we find the position that the Earth is commonly owned by humankind (advocated by Matthias Risse, for example). Although this smacks of biblical hegemony of ‘man’ over the rest of the biosphere, the protagonists claim that this can be reconciled with eco-centric views, although there are limitations: Human basic …
The history of economic thought is written in a deeply Western-centric view. I recently consulted a volume of contributions to monetary theory before Adam Smith that only included European authors. But the first exposition of a theory of money and prices can be found in the Chinese text ‘Guanzi’ which combines different sources across five …
Continue reading "The Moral Economy of Growth and Markets: Chinese Narratives over two Millenia"
Recently I collaborated with my Finnish colleagues Katriina Soini and Juha Hiedanpäa on fleshing out the idea of ‘co-evolutionary technology’. This builds on my earlier blogposts on technosystem services and nature-based solutions. Our launchpad is the critique of nature-based solutions, which are increasingly propagated as a panacea to meeting the problems of our times, especially …
A new journal has been launched: ‘Nature Based Solutions’. This raises the stakes for a concept that originally had no scientific status but emerged as a policy formula, similar to the earlier notion of ‘ecosystem services’. Ecological economics features many newly coined expressions that straddle the scientific and the policy communities, mainly because there is …
Continue reading "Beyond ‘Nature-based Solutions’: The Concept of Co-creative Technology"
Ecological economists have criticized GDP for decades, yet progress is slow in switching to another measure of growth. We have plenty of alternatives, and government agencies worldwide have adopted a set of additional indicators relating to environment and human well-being. But GDP remains the key indicator of economic growth. One reason is that GDP offers …
Recently, I read the book The Birth of Energy. Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, Energy & the Politics of Work by Cara New Daggett. This is a fascinating analysis of the role of thermodynamics as a worldview in the 19th century colonial and imperial expansion of capitalism. The linkage between science and ideology runs via Protestantism, with …
Continue reading "The need for emancipating ourselves from the work ethic of the Technosphere"
Economists and many others are deeply convinced that there is technological progress. Technological progress is a defining idea of Western modernity, originating from the Enlightenment. This is also recognized in the most comprehensive and apparently conclusive account of progress, Pinker’s book ‘Enlightenment Now’. So, it seems insane denying that there is technological progress. Yet, the …
Continue reading "Why technological progress is a delusion and how can get rid of it"
In previous posts I have argued against the flawed anthropocentrism of the ecosystem services concept. But what is the alternative? How can we practically achieve a geocentric turn? Literally, that would mean that we reverse the direction of functional analysis. In the ecosystem concept, we ask what ecosystems do for us. Now we might ask …
Continue reading "Anthropocentric ecosystem services versus geocentric technosystem services"
A decade ago, the German economist Carl Christian von Weizsäcker mused that the phenomenon of declining opportunities for profitable investments that is behind the trend towards declining interest rates might reflect the Second Law of thermodynamics, in the sense that the more capital we accumulate, the more we must struggle to keep it in order, …
The technosphere, our agency, our planet 
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